Topic: Metro: Last Light developer calls the Wii U CPU "horrible, slow"

Read the article here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-20-metro-last-light...

Here's a quote that worried me:
“[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,” said chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov in an interview with NowGamer.

Does this worry anyone? It does me as I've invested over £400 for the Wii-U. I don't want it to have poor CPU.

Judge a console by its productivity, not one negative statement on something seemingly irrelevant.

I find this hard to believe. I haven't heard any such complaints from other third party developers.

The guy was referring to the first developer kit anyway.

I vaguely remembered hearing the previous game was pretty unoptimised, which would explain this. Goes to link and the 2nd comment is the most worthwhile thing said.

"Metro is kinda known for being a fairly unoptimised (yet gorgeous) game so I wouldn't take this comment too seriously. That being said I am worried for the Wii U in terms of power. Its specs are pretty woeful and certainly not next generation.

In the end it's the games that count though."

Anybody ever heard of Nowgamer? Does everybody that lives in their mom's basement have a video game website nowadays?

making the GPU the focus and minimizing the importance of the cpu is probably the best possible route for nintendo to have taken. the graphics of the wii u are very important and nintendo knew people would be scrutinizing the system very hard, so they had to be sure the visual quality would outperform the current gen. by scaling back the cpu they were probably able to afford a better GPU that would make better looking games without a significant sacrifice to the gameplay in most cases.

there's actually been a fair amount. there were a lot of rumors in the summer about how the wii u was underpowered, but most people wrote them off as fanboy lies (some of it was false). the developer of samurai warriors 3 confirmed it openly, though:

"One of the weaknesses of the Wii U compared to PS3 and Xbox 360 is the CPU power is a little bit less. So for games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU.

Developing on new hardware in itself was a challenge, and also making that launch date was a challenge. But from a visual standpoint, based on the performance of the Wii U, we knew the game had the capability of having much better graphics than games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Make no mistake, from a visual standpoint, it is able to produce better graphics. So our challenge was to make a higher quality graphics. We were able to meet that.

While the visuals are great, as is being able to improve them, we had to deal with the lower CPU power and how we can get around that issue. Actually, we're still working on that. If you see the demo on the show floor and you try it, you'll probably feel it's not up to the PS3 level. But we're working on it!

For the PS3 it has multiple CPUs and an SPU, so you can calculate the various motions of the characters on the CPU so overall it runs smoothly. The Xbox 360 CPUs are formulated so they can spread out the processing power so things run efficiently. With the Wii U being new hardware, we're still getting used to developing for it, so there are still a lot of things we don't know yet to bring out the most of the processing power. There's a lot that still needs to be explored in that area."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-21-a-chat-about-the...

Furthermore, I find the specific wording of this statement questionably sensationalist coming from a developer, especially when you compare it to other consoles.

The Wii U's CPU is estimated to run at about 3GHz, while both the PS3 and Xbox 360 run at 3.2GHz. I wouldn't tag that to be "horrible and slow" in comparison, especially when the Wii U's far superior amount of RAM could certainly aid its efficiency. Personally, I don't believe they have familiarised themselves with the console's hardware.

Metro is "horrible, dark"

Wii U's loading times may be slow, but at least they're not PSX/1 slow

The WiiU's CPU may not be up-to-par, but that is because of the inclusion of the GPGPU, which handles many calculations normally handled by the CPU. If they aren't willing to go next-gen by adopting "next-gen standards", then it isn't Nintendo's fault for not having the kind of hardware they're looking for.

@Disconstew That'd be fine if the rest of the abilities of the Wii U were insanely higher than other abilities on competing consoles, but that doesn't seem to be the case on anything except for RAM. Even then, about half of the RAM is dedicated to outside functions while using the Wii U, so it's effectively only twice as strong as the 360. Granted, Nintendo could update the system to allow devs to not have any of those outside features (miiverse, downloading games in the background, internet browser, etc.), but this is Nintendo we're talking about.

We've got to keep in mind that most games won't be affected by this in detrimental ways. In fact, most will end up looking better. Games that heavily rely on CPU, however, like Metro and Orochi Warriors, would be heavily hampered by this. It makes me kind of worried about the chances of Grand Theft Auto 5 landing on the system too, since that is a heavily CPU intensive game. I understand there are tricks around it, but if the core of your game is based on CPU capabilities, then there's a problem.

I honestly thought Metro 2033 was one of the best FPSs of this gen. I just hope THQ doesn't die before Last Light comes out.

People don't buy consoles to render video and they certainly don't buy them for cutting edge visuals. They buy them to play games on their couch in comfort through the biggest screen in their house. If they want those other things they should have got a PC instead.

My PC monitor is the biggest screen in my house.

maybe you should upgrade your TV

Nowgamers a pretty good website, and is affiliated with gamestm magazine I believe, which is the best multi console magazine imo

Also Metro 2033 is one of the best FPS in recent years. Shame really, I know specs aren't everything, but still.
This is going to be wii all over again. As soon as PS4,XBOX3 come out, developers will stop porting games to wii U and we will have to rely on Nintendos slow trickle of AAA games once again to stop our consoles completely gathering dust.

I could've said the same for like three months in late 2007 but for most people though its true. People use their computers and TVs for different things so there's this gap between the hardware you use on one and the other. On a computer resolution matters more than size and noise is less of an issue because you're usually using headphones. So you get large 1080p TVs with low power consumption and very slick looking AV gear in the lounge and smaller often slightly more than 1080p monitors with higher powered components and a complete disregard for looks in the study.

Goes back to the graphics debate. The visuals of the HD gen and the slightly higher end Wii U are good enough for the price we're paying for it. If people want more they should get into PC gaming rather than waiting around for Sony or MS to release a circa 2010 PC experience in late 2013. If people just want to lounge about with slightly less than PC graphics then grab any of the consoles out there. In the opinion of this Nintendo fanboy though the bonus is with the Wii U purely because it'll get HD Mario and Zelda.

Do you really believe the industry can afford for Sony and Microsoft to go all Tim Taylor on us again? Or did you not see what extensive upgrades in costly technology did for us at the beginning of the current gen?

[quote=Master_Ryno]

Nowgamers a pretty good website, and is affiliated with gamestm magazine I believe, which is the best multi console magazine imo

Also Metro 2033 is one of the best FPS in recent years. Shame really, I know specs aren't everything, but still.
This is going to be wii all over again. As soon as PS4,XBOX3 come out, developers will stop porting games to wii U and we will have to rely on Nintendos slow trickle of AAA games once again to stop our consoles completely gathering dust.[/quot

So if Metro 2033 has the same review scores as ZombiU, does that mean we are okay. Listen, I wouldn't worry a whole lot about what the CTO had to say. The fact of the matter is THQ can't afford to run another team. They are in major trouble. If Metro Last Light doesn't hit, they may have to sell out or be face bankruptcy.